1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to user interfaces for searching and browsing and, more specifically, to user interfaces for searching within a document and across multiple documents.
2. Discussion of Related Art
Currently, searching within a document and searching across documents requires two separate interfaces. Users typically search across documents using either a search engine, such as Google or a site specific search (such as Wikipedia search, Amazon search, etc.). Users typically search within a document using the functionality provided by web browsers, such as Internet Explorer or Firefox. There has not been a great need from a usability standpoint to combine these two interfaces, particularly on desktop or laptop computers, because they have enough screen space to display both at the same time, a full QWERTY keypad, and easy random access to any point on the screen using a mouse/touch pad interface. The need to display all matches for an input search term is addressed by Google (via a browser add-in) by highlighting the search matches in a document (see FIG. 1)—the user then must visually identify the right section of the document by looking for the highlighted matched locations (which may require the user to scroll through the document).
This approach works well on devices with large displays, but on display constrained devices, the user must expend considerable effort to navigate through pages to find the matches. The Firefox browser's find interface (see prior Art II) reduces the effort to find the matches by navigating to each match sequentially with the touch of an interface button (“Next”). However, the matches can span across pages, making the navigation process cumbersome. The context information surrounding the match in some cases can be more than a page of information, which, in most cases, is too much information to visually scan quickly. This is particularly true on display constrained devices, where a “page” of information is a relatively small amount of text.
To summarize, a common approach of the various search interfaces (e.g. web sites such as Google, Amazon, US Patent Office, and browsers such as Firefox browser, Internet Explorer, etc.), for handling searches within a document and across a document is separating the text input interfaces for searching across the document and for searching within the document. The former is typically done using a search engine or a web site and the latter using a browser search interface applied to the downloaded document. Furthermore, the process of searching within a document is typically a sequential traversal of “within document” matches with surrounding context information associated with each match being the actual document content itself. These interface approaches, while they may be convenient for personal computer devices with large screens and full, unambiguous keyboards, are highly cumbersome on mobile and television-like devices that are input and/or display constrained.